What Has the War in Afghanistan Accomplished?

Writing in the New Yorker, Dexter Filkins sums up the disaster that is the war in Afghanistan: After eleven years, nearly two thousand Americans killed, sixteen thousand Americans wounded, nearly four hundred billion dollars spent, and more than twelve thousand Afghan civilians dead since 2007, the war in Afghanistan has come to this: the United States is leaving, mission not accomplished. Objectives once deemed indispensable, such as nation-building and counterinsurgency, have been abandoned or downgraded, either because they haven’t worked or because there’s no longer enough time to achieve them. Even the education of girls, a signal achievement of the … Continue reading What Has the War in Afghanistan Accomplished?